“There are gods here, too.” (Herakleitos, 74.)

I’m not sure I’ll swim in the lake this winter. It’s become a tradition to go down to the beach when Forrest, Manon, and their boys visit us in early February–this photo was taken on one of those occasions–but this year we’re meeting them in Portugal. I love the way my entire body wakes up when I plunge into lake water in winter. I thought of a swim on my birthday, a few weeks ago, but it was really cold, and then we had a couple of weeks of intense cold and snow. A quick plunge felt forbidding somehow. But look at us! Look at the sunlight on the lake and sand, our shadows!

In the essay I’ve just finished, I wrote about swimming and archery and sewing. About lyres and bows and Herakleitos. I wrote the way I love best, drawn to the text and its unravelling, what I knew about it and what I didn’t. It asked something of me and I hope I responded in the best way possible. You don’t always know, do you? You think you’re finished and the text sort of lingers in an unsettling way and so you return to it. What I discovered was that this particular essay needed to be opened up physically on the page by using left and right justifications. It needed to have a tensile form, like a bow or a lyre: what Herakleitos called a “backward-turning harmony”. I’ve tried to make that work and there are one or two things to figure out still, because some of the numbered sections have epigraphs and I’m not sure how to format them. But as Carol Shields once said in a radio interview about writing, I have all the time in the world.

All the time in the world. On the day my son and I plunged into the lake in sunlight, the little boys were making rivers in the sand.

In sunlight, too, though the hardhack is bare and the ducklings have all grown up.

 

8. There are gods here, too. (Herakleitos, 74.)

The way you feel after a swim in water that is full of weather somehow, lit green by sun and reflected cedars, pierced with dragonflies, shadowed by the mountain we live under, and wrinkled by light air movement this morning. You are never more yourself but you don’t even begin to think that while you are there. You turn and turn in the water. If you are quiet enough, the mother merganser will pass very near with her newly-hatched ducklings, 17 of them, tiny and buoyant as a wish.